Western Digital struggles to repair huge My Cloud outage, gives workaround

On Friday, 5 days into a large outage impacting its cloud providers, Western Digital lastly offered prospects with a workaround to entry their recordsdata.

Since April 2nd, the outage has prevented customers from accessing recordsdata saved on their WD NAS gadgets, because it required entry to the corporate’s cloud providers.

The whole listing of providers that had been down all through this week contains My Cloud, My Cloud Residence, My Cloud Residence Duo, My Cloud OS 5, SanDisk ibi, and SanDisk Ixpand Wi-fi Charger, along with linked cellular, desktop, and internet apps.

Whereas the corporate said on Sunday, April 2nd, that it was working to revive connectivity and promised to supply updates the subsequent day, a Monday assertion thanked prospects for his or her persistence however failed so as to add any particulars.

4 days later, Western Digital lastly shared a brief answer that helps My Cloud Residence, My Cloud Residence Duo, and SanDisk ibi customers entry their recordsdata regionally.

“The Native Entry function permits you to straight entry your private recordsdata from a Home windows or MacOS pc that’s linked to the identical community as your gadget,” Western Digital said.

“To allow Native Entry, use your favourite browser and connect with your gadget’s Dashboard. Then allow the Native Entry function and create a brand new Native Entry account.”

This knowledge base article supplies detailed data on how one can toggle on Native Entry. Native entry is already enabled for My Cloud OS5 (My Cloud PR sequence and EX sequence) merchandise.

My Cloud outage follows latest safety breach

This huge and ongoing My Cloud outage follows the disclosure of a network breach on Monday, April third, found by Western Digital greater than every week earlier, on March twenty sixth.

An incident investigation involving exterior safety and forensic specialists continues to be within the early levels, and the corporate stated it is also coordinating efforts with legislation enforcement authorities.

Primarily based on proof found to this point, Western Digital believes that the attackers gained entry to a few of its techniques and obtained information from its community.

Whereas the corporate is but to hyperlink this week’s outage with the lately disclosed safety breach, it did affirm on Monday that it took “techniques and providers offline” to safe “enterprise operations” and stated it is working to “restore impacted infrastructure and providers.”

BleepingComputer reached out to Western Digital a number of instances because the outage began to ask if there is a hyperlink between the breach and the My Cloud service interruption, however we solely obtained a reply on Friday after we had been instructed that our message wasn’t delivered.

“We’re experiencing a community service outage and your message has not been delivered. When providers are restored, your message will probably be delivered to the meant recipient. Thanks on your persistence,” the e-mail reply learn.

My Ebook Reside gadgets cleaned in 2021 assaults

This is not the primary time Western Digital prospects misplaced their information, with attackers scanning for Web-exposed and out-of-support My Ebook Reside and My Ebook Reside Duo NAS gadgets worldwide in June 2021 to factory reset and remotely wipe them clear to destroy all information.

The risk actors are believed to have focused an unauthenticated manufacturing facility reset vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-18472.

“In some instances, the attackers have triggered a manufacturing facility reset that seems to erase all information on the gadget,” the corporate instructed BleepingComputer on the time.

Whereas prospects expressed issues that Western Digital’s servers had been hacked to push out distant manufacturing facility reset instructions to all affected gadgets, the corporate denied the rumors and stated that its community had not been breached.

“Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any proof that Western Digital cloud providers, firmware replace servers, or buyer credentials had been compromised,” Western Digital stated.